AI Daily Dev — Week 18

Google Pledges Up to $40B for Anthropic at $350B Valuation

$10B in cash up front; another $30B unlocks if Anthropic hits performance targets — disclosed in Bloomberg/CNBC reports April 24.
Lands days after Amazon's $25B follow-on; Anthropic run-rate revenue hit $30B this month, up from ~$9B at end of 2025.
Google's third Anthropic check since 2023 — and Anthropic still buys TPU capacity from Google, so part of the cash round-trips as compute spend.
HN front page Apr 24–25, 700+ comments framing the deal as 'vendor financing at scale' and a hedge against OpenAI.

industry techcrunch.com

Combined Canadian–German entity keeps the Cohere name, headquartered in Canada; pitched as a sovereign alternative to US frontier labs.
Schwarz Group (parent of Lidl) leads Cohere's concurrent Series E at a ~$20B valuation, plus €500M in structured financing.
Aleph Alpha brings a 250-person team plus European-language tokenizers and small-model expertise; targets public sector, defense, finance, energy.
Announced April 24 — first major sovereign-AI consolidation of the year, ahead of expected EU regulatory and shareholder approval.

industry techcrunch.com

March 4 change cut default reasoning effort from high to medium; reverted April 7 after user pushback.
March 26 bug discarded thinking history mid-session, making Claude 'forgetful' and burning quotas; fixed April 10.
April 16 system prompt capped responses at 25 words between tool calls — measurably worse coding; reverted April 20.
Anthropic is resetting usage limits for all subscribers; AMD AI exec called Claude Code 'unusable for complex engineering' before the fix.
Companion HN post 'I cancelled Claude: token issues, declining quality, and poor support' hit the front page April 24.

tools anthropic.com

sora.com web and mobile apps discontinued April 26, 2026; API follows September 24.
Active users fell from a peak of ~1M to under 500K while the app burned ~$1M/day in compute.
Disney's $1B Sora character-licensing deal scrapped — Disney was reportedly told under an hour before the public shutdown notice.
Compute being redirected to GPT-5.5, Codex, and the rumored ChatGPT 'super app' ahead of OpenAI's IPO push.

industry openai.com

Open-source platform that lets you assign issue-tracker tickets to Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, Gemini, or Cursor agents — they pick up the work, write code, report blockers, update status.
21.6K GitHub stars and v0.2.17 shipped April 26; +7K stars in the past week pushed it to #5 on GitHub Trending.
Same Trendshift week saw andrej-karpathy-skills cross 70K stars and Hermes Agent pass 100K — the 'skills + managed agents' stack is consolidating.
Self-host build logs on Hetzner and DigitalOcean trending alongside it as teams move agent fleets off vendor SaaS.

open-source github.com